Kilimanjaro: A Fable of Utopia Read online

  “I hadn’t considered the expenses,” I admitted.

  “I had,” said Joshua. “But I had no idea they’d be so high.” He frowned. “The Maasai have always lived in harmony with Nature. It’s our heritage, and it would be against everything we stand for if we got rid of the parks.”

  “But you’re not living in harmony with Nature,” Blumlein pointed out gently. “You’ve enclosed it with a force field.”

  “Do you want to get rid of them, William?” demanded Joshua.

  “No, I don’t,” replied Blumlein. “I just want to point out some of the arguments we’ll be facing if we decide to keep them.” He turned to me. “Well, historian?”

  I shrugged. “We live in a capitalist society. Over the centuries all other economic systems have been failures.”

  “Go on,” said Blumlein, and I could tell he knew what I was about to say and approved of it.

  “We’re on an artificial, terraformed world,” I continued. “We’re not going to discover gold or diamonds or fissionable materials on Kilimanjaro. Any wealth we enjoy must be wealth we ourselves create, and that means to continue their existence the parks must become economically self-sufficient. They must pay for Katoo’s team, and once they prove they can do that, they will eventually be required to pay for the maintenance of the force field was well. If they can’t pay their own way, then they’ll have to go.”

  “I agree completely,” said Blumlein. “Now the question is: how can we make the parks pay for themselves?”

  “You know the answer,” I said.

  “Yes, but I’d rather hear it from you,” he said with the hint of an amused smile. “That way I won’t feel too lonely, getting out ahead of an issue all by myself.”

  “Hell, you knew it when you called us here,” said Joshua irritably. “If we want to keep the parks over the opposition you’re receiving, we have to make them self-supporting.”

  “And that means?” said Blumlein.

  “It means opening Kilimanjaro up to tourism from Earth,” I said.

  “I think you’re right, David.”

  “You know I’m right,” I said. “You just want me to argue it in front of the Council so the ones who are against it get mad at me instead of you.”

  Blumlein smiled. “Isn’t a politician supposed to protect his ass while he’s solving problems?”

  “I only know one politician,” said Joshua. “And sometimes he annoys the shit out of me.”

  “Well, he’s going to annoy you a lot more,” said Blumlein.

  “What now?” demanded Joshua.

  “Now I want you to think.”

  “Think about what?” replied Joshua, confused.

  Blumlein looked at me, and saw that I understood what he was driving at. “Tell him, David,” he said.

  “It’s a game of dominos,” I said to Joshua. “Each thing we do leads to another. If we open the game parks to tourists, we’re going to need lodges to house them. We’re going to need roads from the landing field to the parks. We’re going to need real game wardens, because if we get enough tourists to pay for the parks, they’re inevitably going to do harm to the parks’ ecology. We can’t let them wander through the parks on foot, not with all the predators we have, so we’ll need to import special vehicles, and that means we’ll need to create roads, or at least tracks, for the vehicles, and we’ll need to train some of our people to drive and service those vehicles.”

  “That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” added Blumlein, “not that anyone’s likely to find any icebergs in Kilimanjaro. We have a landing field that we have named Haven. Right now it’s just an empty area. But if we start a tourist industry, we can’t have tourists just standing on a field with their baggage until a ship arrives. We’ll need a small spaceport, not for the ships—not in the beginning, anyway—but for the tourists. They’ll need a place to bring their luggage, to get out of the weather and away from the thrusts of the retro rockets, to eat a meal while waiting for their ships. And we’re assuming a daily ship from Earth, the kind that brought the Maasai here to begin with. But the kind of man or woman who can afford the time and expense to come here just to look at animals is probably flying a private ship, so we’ll need a hangar, a fueling station, and trained mechanics at the very minimum.”

  “Then I guess we kill the parks after all,” said Joshua.

  “Why?” asked Blumlein.

  “What you’re describing isn’t a Maasai Utopia,” replied Joshua. “It’s closer to a Maasai’s idea of hell.”

  Blumlein turned to me. “Is it, David?”

  “It depends on which Maasai you ask,” I replied. “Don’t forget that back on Earth eighty percent of the Maasai deserted the savannahs for the cities; clearly they were interested in profit. And even the pastoralists have never been shy about taking tourists’ money. As early as the late 20th century we had model villages that tourists could visit, and wander through, looking into the huts, taking photographs and videos, asking questions, and our elmoran spent far more time satisfying the tourists’ curiosity then tending their cattle. By the dawn of the 21st century, we had created many jobs related to tourism. Did you know that in the year 2020 A.D. alone, we sold 7,000 authentic Maasai spears? Less than a thousand were sold in Africa; the rest were sold through dealers, or via the internet.”

  “So was it really hell?” said Blumlein.

  “If it wasn’t, why did we emigrate to Kilimanjaro?” said Joshua.

  “You came here to create a Utopia.”

  “So did the Kikuyu of Kirinyaga,” said Joshua.

  “Did they, David?” said Blumlein.

  “No,” I answered. “They came here to replace a Utopia that they thought existed before the coming of the Europeans. We have come here to create one, and we have no blueprint.”

  “We know what not to create,” Joshua insisted.

  “Do we?” replied Blumlein. “Show me a Maasai who is opposed to wealth, who disdains cattle and shillings, and I will agree.”

  “So will we take money from the hospitals or the farmers to pay for your tourist industry?”

  “Wealth isn’t finite, Joshua,” continued Blumlein. “You can see that yourself, just by observing a herd of cattle. Every time one is born, the herd becomes worth more—and no other herd became worth less because of it. That creates wealth. We’re examining some of the consequences of creating a park system that pays for itself. It brings in tourist money, money that doesn’t exist on Kirinyaga until the tourist spends it. It brings jobs as game wardens, vehicle mechanics, lodge workers—jobs that will not exist until the tourist requires help. The money spent on these jobs will not be taken from someone else on Kirinyaga. It is money that will increase our wealth, not merely redistribute it.”

  “Stop lecturing me as if I was a schoolchild!” said Joshua angrily.

  “Then stop using a schoolchild’s arguments,” replied Blumlein. “If the people wanted to live exactly as they lived in Kenya and Tanzania, then they wouldn’t have come to Kilimanjaro. Like any potential Utopia, this is an experiment. I’ll keep the parks if I can, and I’ll deal with what follows as best I can. But if I can’t keep the parks, if I can’t win a majority of the Elders to my side, I won’t quit and return to Earth with my tail between my legs. I’ll come up with another blueprint for another Utopia. What I won’t do is preside over an exact duplicate of life on Earth. If that was Utopia, then the Maasai should never have left it in the first place.”

  “It was closer than what you’re proposing,” insisted Joshua.

  “You’ll have to forgive me if I disagree with you,” said Blumlein.

  “You can disagree with me in front of the Council,” said Joshua, “because that’s where I intend to make my arguments.”

  “That’s the best place for them,” agreed Blumlein. “I’ll see you there.”

  Joshua walked to the door, then turned to me. “Are you coming, David?” he said, still agitated.

  “I have some further business to dis
cuss with David,” said Blumlein. “I’ll see that he’s provided a ride when we’re finished.”

  Joshua left without another word. Blumlein waited a moment to make sure he wasn’t coming back, then turned to me. “Thank you for not mentioning it, David,” he said.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t think of it himself,” I replied. “It was obvious.”

  “Only to an historian,” said Blumlein. “Remember, Africa hasn’t had any large mammals for a couple of centuries, and they did everything they could to protect them for the half century before that. How could he know about culling?”

  “Still,” I said, “he should have been able to figure out that one rhino horn, not poached but sacrificed, could support the two parks for twenty years. Long enough to grow a few more rhinos, and sacrifice another.”

  “I can’t argue with the math,” agreed Blumlein.

  “What will you do if he thinks of it in time to mention it to the Council?” I asked.

  “The math is indisputable, but I can argue with the morality. The game parks culled animals when they exceeded the parks’ capacity to feed them. It was a quick death in lieu of death by slow starvation. More to the point, the animals were there first, and were required to make an accommodation with the human inhabitants. Whereas absolutely nothing was here. This is an artificial world with no native life forms. We have rhinos and other animals because we wanted them, we cloned them, and we nurtured them, and it is immoral to kill even one of them as a matter of economic convenience.”

  “I was right,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “This job,” I said. “You’re the right man for it.”

  “I’ve barely had time to get my feet wet,” replied Blumlein. “The really interesting part lies ahead.”

  Then he got busy with the really interesting part.

  He made his case before the Council, and made it well. It was the first time Joshua ole Saibull had ever lost a unanimous decision.

  Within a month construction began on two luxury lodges, one in each park, run by Maasai in crisp green uniforms. Biologists were invited from Earth to lecture the new staff on the intricacies of their jobs and the ecosystems. Engineers came to teach our new mechanics how to keep the lodges’ systems functioning. Experts were imported to train our new chefs, waiters and concierges.

  Outside each park were a pair of brand-new manyattas. Articulate young men and women, who discarded their shorts and shirts each morning in favor of their red robes, took visitors on a tour of the manyattas, relating fact, history and legend with equal enthusiasm.

  Within a year we had built a spaceport, with room for expansion. Some of our men and women were sent to Earth to learn the major tourist languages, others to study the workings of more complex spaceports against the day that ours, too, became busier and more complex.

  The spaceport originally housed a currency exchange, but this soon became a full service bank. In fact, small banks were starting to spring up across the savannah so that the pastoralists would not have to bring the money they made from tourists all the way into the cities.

  The attractions we offered increased. Weddings were open to the (paying) public. So was the Eunoto ceremony. The traditional Maasai dances, in which the elmoran jump straight up and down endlessly, proved to be an unsatisfactory attraction, so we hired choreographers from the Shona and Xhosa tribes to enliven them.

  One very fair-skinned tourist received a serious sunburn, and who should treat him but the former laiboni-turned-nurse Sokoine ole Parasayip? Not only that, but once the tourist found out that he’d been nursed by a genuine witch doctor, he insisted on taking home some of the generic ointment Sokoine had used on him. This was not lost on Sokoine or his superiors, and within a month Authentic Laiboni Skin Care was being packaged here and exported not only to Earth but to the other Eutopian colonies as well.

  It was an exciting time to be on Kilimanjaro, to see the many changes that were occurring in our society. Every day brought a new innovation. The few that didn’t work were replaced by those that did.

  It was almost two years to the day after Joshua had stormed out of the office that I found myself sitting on the shaded patio of Blumlein’s new house, sharing a drink with him.

  “You should be very proud of yourself,” I told him. “You seem to have the golden touch. Everything’s running like clockwork.”

  “Come on, David,” he said. “You’re an historian. You know better.”

  I stared at his questioningly.

  “We’ve already got our first measurable air pollution,” said Blumlein. “Sooner or later some new virus is going to strike the game parks, and if it hits the predators we’ll have to cull the larger herbivores or they’ll eat themselves out of the park, and if it hits the herbivores will have to cull the predators or they’ll die of slow starvation. With all the money floating around the savannah, it’s going to be impossible for the traditionalists to continue to use their cattle as currency. We’re undergoing a nine percent inflation rate right now, and even after we cure that, no economy ever goes too long without a recession. Other Eutopian worlds have noticed what we’ve done, and a few are following suit; eventually we’ll have to battle them for tourist shillings.”

  “So you don’t think it will last?”

  “Nothing lasts, David,” he replied easily. “The only question is whether it will outlast us.”

  “That makes it sound very much like you think our Utopia is a failure.”

  He took a sip of his drink. “You’re looking at it all wrong. Everyone has pitched in, planning and working, for the past two years. That’s the key, and that’s where Kirinyaga made its error.”

  I frowned. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “Men have always thrived on challenges,” he said with the hint of a smile. “Has it ever occurred to you, David, that perhaps Utopia isn’t an end result at all, but rather the simple act of striving for that result?”

  It hadn’t.

  But I’ve thought a lot about it since that night, and I think maybe he was right.

  At least I don’t worry about the future anymore.